Talk:Buzz Arlett
I would have enjoyed the story far more if HT hadn't pulled this one out of his ass. HT's a serious baseball fan and I would have liked seeing his opinion on which real players, if any, would have played Ruth's revolutionary role absent the man himself. I really would have liked to see him suggest that Lou Gehrig would have been the superstar, as he sort of did in TL-191--I've long had a hero-worship thing going for Gehrig, and I like to see alternate worlds in which he gets the fame he so richly deserves and isn't under anyone else's shadow. And I really REALLY would have liked to see the discussion of baseball suggest that in the absense of Ruth no one stepped up to transform the game into a home run-dominated exercise, and see 19th-century offensive tactics hold up, with long fences, high batting averages, and speedy baserunning a major factor to a high slugging percentage. (Joe Jackson was considered the original great slugger, but he did it by driving up his SP with triples and even inside-the-park homers that he got by hitting 'em deep and running like there was no tomorrow.) Turtle Fan 21:58, 24 June 2009 (UTC) :Buzz Arlett was real. TR 16:30, 25 June 2009 (UTC) ::Oh, how embarrassing. :-( ::I still don't like this Ruth-for-Arlett swap. It seems like a second PoD. Why does Ruth's bad fortune necessarily need to be Arlett's good fortune? Turtle Fan 21:20, 25 June 2009 (UTC) ::::I would say (and I'm only reading the summary here) that given the PoD, Ruth wasn't called up but there still was an empty slot so someone would have been. HT picked a minor league player similar to Ruth who became a superstar to illustrate Fame is a matter of luck as well as talent. ML4E 03:42, 26 June 2009 (UTC) :::::Hmm, perhaps, on the point of illustrating the vagaries of fame. As for "There's an opening, better find someone," however: in the pre-farm days, and especially in the pre-players' union days when it was cheap to sign stars to contracts and once they were yours, they were yours, teams routinely signed far more prospects than they needed to fill out their rosters. Besides, Arlett wound up with the Dodgers, not the Red Sox, though I do suppose there could have been the same trade as in OTL but with Brooklyn in for the Bronx. Charles Ebbetts I don't know all that much about, but I do know he devised the last-shall-be-first draft system that is now the silver lining on the horrible seasons of cellar-dwelling teams in professional sports leagues throughout North America; so I don't think he was a big-money guy like Rupert. Turtle Fan 04:26, 26 June 2009 (UTC) ::::::This. I read the story as being less about who would fill the Babe's shoes, but a meditation on the fact that most of Ruth's early success was a result of decisions entirely out of his control. If Dunn hadn't pull him out of the school, if the Terrapins hadn't eaten into Oriole business, if other teams hadn't of passed, then he wouldn't have ended up with the Red Sox. Who replaced him is pretty inconsequential for HT's purposes, I believe, hence Arlett's bio in like 5 sentences or less. HT is more interested in just how many outside forces were reponsible for Ruth's greatness, and how little he had to say about it. (Obviously, his efforts to "strike" which saw him traded to the Yankees were in his control, but that's outside the scope of HT's interest.) TR 16:25, 26 June 2009 (UTC) ::::::::It may not be a significant detail, but it's still an annoying one. HT had a chance, aside from showimg Ruth's dependence (and all of our dependence) on chance, to give us a peek into what baseball without Ruth looked like. He didn't need to bring that up at all, but he chose to do so. I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting a subplot, if it's going to be developed, to be developed in an interesting manner. And not twee--"house that Buzz built" indeed. Turtle Fan 17:04, 26 June 2009 (UTC) :::It's just a story. TR 23:15, 25 June 2009 (UTC) ::::Well of course it is. They're all just stories. That's never stopped us from discussing them seriously before now, nor airing complaints about things that didn't sit right with us. Turtle Fan 04:26, 26 June 2009 (UTC) Can anyone figure out what that anon editor's punctuation was supposed to do? Doesn't seem to have changed a thing, to me. Turtle Fan 19:28, December 30, 2009 (UTC) :No. I was so excited to see that an anonymous editor didn't write the word "penis" into the article, I didn't actually notice what was changed. TR 19:50, December 30, 2009 (UTC) ::I did a Compare Differences expecting to find either that or some pissy little "Arlett didn't play for the Dodgers!" whine. Instead he screwed around with some coding for the phrase "Babe Ruth of the Minor Leagues." Doesn't seem to have done anything. Turtle Fan 23:14, December 30, 2009 (UTC) :::Thinking back--how long has it been since we've had a "this is all wrong" complaint? I don't think we've seen one of those in months. TR 23:25, December 30, 2009 (UTC) ::::You know, you're right. I guess some of these countermeasures worked after all. Turtle Fan 00:38, December 31, 2009 (UTC)